Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Steaming cakes in a ricecooker can be very addictive. After my first attempt at steaming my very first ricecooker cake, I was looking forward to trying out my 2nd ricecooker cake recipe with a lot of excitement and expectation. This recipe, in my opinion, should be an easier recipe simply because it is a chocolate lava cake (also called chocolate pudding cake), meaning that the centre of the cake should be wet and lava-like. So no worries about the cake being semi-cooked, unlike my ricecooker marble cake.

I made this chocolate lava cake at home and brought it to share with some friends and the cake was very well-received and finished within minutes. Nobody believed that it was made using a ricecooker. (Well, in this part of the world where I currently live, the humble ricecooker is not a very common household gadget, in fact I only know 2 other families who have ricecookers at home.)

One of my friends said that it looked like a space cake! Very futuristic!

On the other hand, the banana cake which I tried steaming using the steamer was a complete disaster, and you could tell it from their faces when I offered the cake to my friends, they were too polite to reject it, but still they took a small bite. But kids don't lie in general. When I asked my friends' kids whether the steamed banana cake was lekker (delicious), they said nee (no) and they gave the half-eaten piece of cake back to me. :S

(Didn't have my big nikon with me, so all photos were taken by my lousy 5-year-old Fuji F50)

So I concluded that I had better luck steaming a cake using a ricecooker than using a steamer. :)

[Important : I hope you enjoy this cake as much as I do, and I would be happy if you could give credit where credit is due, and link back to this post if you do make this cake and share it on your blog or facebook. Remember plagiarism is not the best form of flattery.]

(Whenever my ricecooker has finished cooking, it will beep and switch automatically to "KEEP WARM" mode, so you just have to press "CANCEL" and press "COOK" again. If you don't have the "RAPID COOK" button on your ricecooker, then just pressing "COOK" will do. This is a cake that works in a ricecooker without the "CAKE" baking function, so it should work even if you
don't have a japanese automatic ricecooker, such as those manual ones with only one button, as long as you cook for at least 1 hour. )

After 1 hour, see the cake looked quite wet and wobbly in the centre.

After 1 hour 15 min, see the difference?

Cooled and flipped out of the rice pot.

Notes:

1. Using my Toshiba RC10L-MI ricecooker, I pressed "COOK" until it beeps (29 min), then I pressed "COOK" a second time until it beeps (17 min), finally I pressed "RAPID COOK" until it beeps (14 min). It is amazing how the timings were almost identical to my ricecooker marble cake. Now as this was my first attempt at steaming this chocolate lava cake, I was afraid it might turn out to be too wet that I could not turn out the cake on a plate without the chocolate lava gushing out like a volcano (ok a bit exagerated here), so I erred on the side of caution and pressed "RAPID COOK" (4th time) again after 1 hour was up and that took an extra 15 more minutes, a total of 1 hour 15 minutes. But my worries were unfounded, because the chocolate lava in the centre of the cake kind of hardened by the next day. So I could have stuck to 1 hour and my cake would be wet in the middle and the chocolate lava would ooze out just like a perfect chocolate lava cake. :p

2. Same thing as I have mentioned before in my first ricecooker cake, remember to remove any rice grains from the rice pot and grease it slightly with a little oil or butter or baking spray. The cake should slip out of the pot easily when you invert it. Use a plate to cover the top of the pot before inverting the cake. Do not attempt to loosen and remove the cake using a knife as you will risk damaging the non-stick surface of the rice pot.

3. While the cake is steaming in the ricecooker, do not open and peep. Not until 60 minutes are over. You may use your fingertip to press the centre of the cake to see if it is as firm and springy as the sides. Now since this is a chocolate lava cake, the centre will be very soft and wet, so do not be alarmed. Pricking the centre using a toothpick, and you will find that the toothpick will come out wet, but that is perfectly normal.

4. Note that cooking time may vary based on the capacity of your rice cooker. Mine has a 5.5 cup capacity.

The event "Aspiring Bakers #25 -
Steaming Hot Cakes (Nov 2012)" has finally come to a beautiful end.
Thanks to the enthusiastic participation of fellow bloggers who
unreservedly shared with us their steamed cake recipes, we now have a
repertoire of 50 steamed cake recipes!

I hope you have
had as much fun as I did steaming the cakes, or admiring them. If you
have yet to try steaming a cake, perhaps this would be a good starting
point. Thank you once again for joining this event. Hope to see you gals
at the next AB event hosted by me, stay tuned. :)

[End of update]

Dag iedereen,

That's the Dutch way of saying 'Hello everyone'.

Welcome to my humble blog! I will be hosting this month's Aspiring Bakers #25 - Steaming Hot Cakes (November 2012). Many thanks to Small Small Baker for giving me this opportunity to host this event.

Talking about steamed cakes, I am sure some of you, especially bakers from Asia, would have tried their hands at least once at steaming cakes in a steamer; be it a bamboo dim sum steamer, an electronic multi-tiered steamer or a metallic stacked steamer. Steaming cakes used to be the norm in Asia many years ago when the convection oven was still very expensive and considered a luxury item in the kitchen. Even up till today, there are still many households in Asia which do not own an oven. But nowadays things have changed, and many asian households make more cakes using an oven than using a steamer.

Cake steamed using a steamer

Besides steaming cakes in a steamer, have you ever tried steaming cakes in a ricecooker? Your ricecooker need not be one equipped with a built-in baking function. My little Toshiba doesn't have such a cake baking function, yet I have used it a few times to steam cakes successfully. You just need to fiddle around and experiment with the various functions of your ricecooker to get to know it better and then try steaming a cake using a tried-and-tested recipe. Steaming cakes in a ricecooker is very easy, not to mention that ricecooker cakes taste as good or even better than oven-baked cakes. For a start, I will show you a simple recipe on how to bake steam a cake using a ricecooker.

Cake steamed using a ricecooker

The category of steamed cakes is not all-encompassing. For the purpose of the theme for this month's Aspiring Bakers, which is Steaming Hot Cakes, we only accept cakes which are steamed in a steamer, wok/pot or ricecooker. Cakes which are baked in a oven, including steam-baked cakes are strictly not accepted.

We do not accept cakes which are
1) steam-baked in an oven, since this involves the use of an oven.

2) made in a microwave oven.

3) steamed baos or breads (this will be featured as a separate theme in the future).

4) kuehs even though they may have been steamed as we want to avoid too much overlap with a previously featured theme. Kuehs have already been featured under the Traditional Kueh theme in Oct 2011. Basically anything that has a kueh-like texture will not be accepted, for instance 9-layer kueh lapis, png kueh, ang ku kueh, tapioca kueh just to name a few. I know this maybe a bone of contention for some bloggers, since strictly speaking, huat kueh, ji dan gao, ma lai gao and honeycomb cakes are also considered kuehs, but let's draw the line here.

5) savoury chinese steamed kuehs such as pumpkin cake, carrot cake/chai tao kueh and yam cake (the same reasoning as given in point 4).

Who can join?
Everybody, whether you have a blog or not, just as long as you fulfill the requirements.

a) If you have a blog, which makes things easier, just submit using the inlinkz tool below by clicking on the "Add your link" icon.

b) For those who do not have a blog, just email your recipe with the title "Aspiring Bakers #25" and send to everybodyeatswell[at]gmail[dot]com in the following format:

Your name or nickname:Name of your bake:URL or attachment of your photo (one photo for each entry):(If you are attaching a photo in your email, pls limit the photo size to 500kb).

How to join?Step 1
Steam any cake in the month of November 2012. You may submit more than 1 entry.

Step 2
Post it on your blog between 01 November 2012 to 30 November 2012.
Your post must include the recipe or link to the original recipe. If you are using a recipe from a book, please include the title and author of the book too.

Any entries that are posted outside the date range will not be accepted.

Any entries that do not include a recipe or link to the original recipe will not be accepted too.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Recently, I was toying with the idea of steaming a few cakes using my ricecooker since I am gonna be the host for next month's Aspiring Bakers (let me take the chance to advertise this event) and the theme is gonna be Steaming Hot Cakes. I thought it would be great to discard the conventional notion that a cake should be baked and explore steaming a cake using an unconventional method - the humble ricecooker.

My humble 4 year old Toshiba (RC10L-MI)

However, there are not many cake recipes on the web that teach you exactly how to steam a cake using a ricecooker. I manage to find a Toshiba ricecooker pdf manual that documents how exactly to bake steam a cake using the Cook, Rapid Cook or Congee setting in a Toshiba ricecooker. That is a godsend since my Toshiba does not have a Cake function like some of the more expensive, advanced models. I also found another recipe (which I have no idea where I found it from, certainly not from Toshiba) that only says "Press Cook and allow to bake for 50-60 min". Somehow this recipe attracted my attention and I decided to give it a try since it looked pretty straightforward and I thought the instructions should be applicable for all types of ricecookers, not just Toshiba. So it was this recipe which I used yesterday to steam my very first ricecooker cake - a Chocolate Swirl Butter Cake, better known in layman terms as a Marble Cake.

Here it is, my very first (toshiba) ricecooker cake. Just look at the resultant cake when it first came out of the ricecooker, doesn't it look like some volcano crater? Haha.

But when you turn it around, it looks very nice and curvy, a beautiful dome-shaped cake. Look at the crust, isn't it beautiful? The chocolate swirl should have been more spread-out instead of being concentrated in one area, that was my mistake, as I disregarded the instructions and did what I did previously for my oven-baked marble cake. :( Otherwise this would have been a beautiful ricecooker steamed chocolate swirl butter cake.

If you look carefully enough at the picture below, you will notice that the centre of the cake (actually the top of the cake since the cake was inverted) was a bit wet. I actually had an inkling of the problem when I first opened the ricecooker, I poked the surface using my finger and noticed that the cake was firm and springy to the touch at the sides but the centre seemed to be a bit soft. But I was hard-pressed for time yesterday, this cake was actually meant to be brought to somebody's house, and I was already late for the appointment. So I just took the cake out, turned it over, and cut it into half. Indeed, the cake was a bit wet and lava-like right in the middle, about the area of a 2-cm circle, but the rest of the cake was well-cooked. I was disappointed since I couldn't bring the cake along. But tastewise, the cake was very yummy. It was sweet, moist and buttery but not crumbly, and a bit chocolaty. Honestly, it tasted just like an oven-baked marble cake. You wouldn't have guessed that this was a cake steamed in a ricecooker. The crust was especially firm and crispy and the cake tastes even better the next day.

I was pondering and hesitating whether I should publish this post
at all as it
was not exactly a 100 percent successful cake (on a scale of 10, i would
give it an 8 to 8.5), but I thought it might be interesting to those
who are
learning to make cakes using their ricecookers. Furthermore I think I
should also
document my experience so that I can learn from my mistakes, and I can
share my experience online with others. Hopefully some readers (if there is
anybody reading my blog at all) will be able to feedback and give me a
pointer or two, on their own experiences and how to improve this
ricecooker cake recipe further.

[Important : I hope you enjoy this cake as much as I do, and I would be happy if you could give credit where credit is due, and link back to this post if you do make this cake and share it on your blog or facebook. Remember plagiarism is not the best form of flattery.]

So here is the recipe of my very first ricecooker cake, a handwritten recipe adapted from Gourmet Haven (link unknown).

Ingredients

200g butter

200 190g sugar (still too sweet for me, would like to reduce to 175g in future)

3 eggs

1 egg yolk

190g cake flour/plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

70g melted chocolate (melted in double boiler or in microwave on High for 1 min)

Method

1. Cream butter and sugar together till light and fluffy.

2. Mix in 3 eggs and 1 egg yolk, one by one.

3. Fold in sifted flour and baking powder.

4. Fold in melted chocolate (mix a little to create a spiral effect).

5. Pour mixture into a greased rice pot.

6. Press "COOK" in the ricecooker and allow to cook for 50-60 minutes at least 60 minutes.

7. Cool the cake for a while, then flip the cake out onto a plate.

Important Notes

1. Remember to remove any remaining rice grains from the rice pot before pouring in the cake batter as you definitely don't want your cake to end up a rice cake. :)

2. Remember to grease the rice pot. No doubt the rice pot is non-stick,
but you should still grease the pot slightly, no need to use too much
oil/butter/baking spray as this is a butter cake which is high in fat content. It will slip out of the pot in a split second when you invert it. Use a plate to cover the top of the pot before you invert the cake. Do not use a knife to loosen the cake as you will risk damaging the non-stick surface of the rice pot.

3. Using my Toshiba RC10L-MI ricecooker, I pressed "COOK" until it beeps (9.02am->9.32am, 30 min), then I pressed "COOK" a second time until it beeps (9.32am->9.49am, 17 min), finally I pressed "RAPID COOK" until it beeps (9.49am->10.02am, 13 min), it took
60 min in total, just as expected. But the cake was still a bit wet in the middle, I should have pressed "COOK" or "RAPID COOK" again (a 4th time) when the cake was not well done in the middle after 60 min, but then I was rushing for time....

4. While the cake is steaming in the ricecooker, do not open and peep. Not until 60 minutes are over. Then you can open the ricecooker and check if it is cooked. First test with a toothpick by poking around, and then use your fingertip to press the centre of the cake to see if it is as firm as the sides. Usually the cake will be well-cooked and hence firm and springy to the touch at the sides. But if the centre of the cake is not well-cooked, it will be softer and denser than the sides. Flip the cake out into a plate and cut it into half. If the cake is not well-cooked in the centre, no worries, put the 2 halves back together, use a plate to flip it back into the ricecooker pot and press "COOK" and let it cook until it beeps. Then check using your finger again, be careful of your finger though :)

5. You know what, I was a smart-aleck. I took out half of the batter after step 3, and added the melted chocolate so that there was a portion of plain batter and another portion of chocolate batter. Then I tried to add alternating spoons of plain and chocolate batter, just like my oven-baked marble cake. But it didn't work very well for me, cos the batter was not fluid enough and I had difficulty achieving the spiral effect of a marble cake. On hind sight, I should have stuck to the original step (which I have written above) of just adding melted chocolate to the batter in step 4 and pour the whole batter into the ricecooker pot.

6. If you want something easier for a start, you can just leave out the chocolate and make a ricecooker butter cake using the same recipe. Cook for at least 1 hour. Easy peasy. :)

Finally, someone tried my 1st rice cooker cake, I shouldn't have dismissed this marble cake without giving it another chance, should have tried it again and cooked it longer, maybe 10 to 15 min more!

On 7 Jan 2014, I received an email from Alicia G who said "Hi Ms B, First of all, I would like to say thank you so much for sharing this recipe. I've tried it myself & taste real good & moist too. Btw, just to share with you the cake that I baked using your recipe with my Panasonic 5-cups rice cooker. P/S: Made a swirl but once flip over, it's gone." Thank you Alicia for your feedback, I am very very happy that you tried out my 1st rice cooker cake recipe, shows that this recipe is good but just needs more time to cook in my Toshiba! :)

On 2 May 2014, Cat from Malaysia emailed me a foto of her lovely rice cooker marble cake saying "I baked your recipe yesterday. Super soft cake n yummy! Thank you very much for sharing! Next round if I bake, I will reduce sugar (because for current recipe I've added more melted dark chocolate coins hence a tad too sweet) and use 3 eggs instead of plus 1 egg yolk because it tasted a bit 'egg-gy'. And my Panasonic rice cooker (without bake function) cooked it at around 43 minutes! Really yums! Thanks again for sharing!!! Please share more." Cat was using Panasonic SR-MPA18, 10cup capacity. Thank you Cat for your feedback!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

This is the last of the 4 pound cakes I baked for the prayer weekend last Sunday, the other 3 being two Condensed Milk Pound Cake and one Nigella Maderia Cake. Out of the 4 cakes, this is my absolute favourite and it was also very well-received by the folks at the prayer weekend who had probably never tasted a green cake before! Many of them had asked me what the green cake was, and they were all very eager to try it out when I said that it was made of green tea powder. Luckily the cake didn't let me down. :)

This cake was very moist and flavourful and the scent and taste of the matcha green tea powder was evident but not too overpowering. It was a nice refreshing taste, definitely one good recipe to wow your guests!

2. Using a cake-mixer, cream butter and sugar together till light and fluffy.

3. Gradually add beaten eggs and mix well.

4. Add the sifted flour mixture in 3 additions. Use a spatula to fold in the flour swiftly and thoroughly.

5. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake in a preheated oven at 170C (or 340F) for 50 min. (Original recipe stated 30-40 min but I found the cake still too wet after 40 min, so I extended the baking time by another 10 min).

This is the 3rd of 4 pound cakes which I baked during my baking frenzy the last weekend, the first 2 being Condensed Milk Pound Cakes. I think I don't have to introduce who Nigella is. She is my idol. I was glued to the TV for 1 whole month watching her cooking up a storm in Food Network, while I was just recovering from childbirth in February this year. The Food Network channel would show her cooking program almost every other hour on TV. Needless to say, I have a lot of her recipes bookmarked in my to-do-list.

This recipe is uncannily similar to the lemon butter cake which I bake quite frequently. This Madeira Cake apparently originated from Madeira, a Portuguese archipelago which is a very popular year-round tourist resort. The difference between my previous lemon butter cake and this Madeira Cake is that, the former has a lemon sugar syrup drizzled on top, whereas the latter has a sprinkling of sugar on top. I like this Madeira Cake, as it is less troublesome and less work for me since there is one less lemon to grate and one less pot to wash after boiling the lemon sugar syrup. Although tastewise, the lemon butter cake is slightly more moist and flavourful due to the syrup. :)

This is a rather big loaf cake, unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the cake before it was sliced. Otherwise you can see the nice sugar crusting formed on top of the cake. This cake can easily be cut into 25 pieces, as you can see from my photo. :)

2. Using a cake-mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the grated lemon zest/rind and mix well.

3. Add the eggs one at a time, together with 1 tbsp of flour each. (No additional flour is required, the flour should be taken from the 300g flour mixture.)

4. Using a spatula, gently mix in the rest of the sifted flour in 3 additions, and finally add the lemon juice. (I found the batter too thick, so after 2/3 of the flour were added, I added 1/2 of the lemon juice, then followed by the last 1/3 of the flour, and finally the remaining 1/2 of the lemon juice.)

5. Pour the batter into a greased large loaf pan. Using a spatula, gently spread and level the cake batter, then sprinkle 2 tbsp of castor sugar on top of the batter. Bake for 1 hour at 170C until a toothpick comes out clean. (I baked for about 1 hour + 10 min).

Monday, October 8, 2012

It's me again, back after a long hiatus of more than 2 months. I was too busy and lazy to update this blog of mine. There were a few new cakes which I attempted, such as green tea chiffon cake and coffee chiffon cake, but I didn't find them fantastic enough to blog about them. It was only until last Saturday evening that I began my baking frenzy again (and used up 500 grams of butter to bake 4 loaf cakes in total) that I decided I have to quickly jot it down in my blog lest I forget the recipes again. :)

I decided to roll up my sleeves to bake some cakes after a friend had sent an email to request for some tea-time desserts for last Sunday's prayer weekend. So I took it upon myself to offer my humble services and at the same time, try out a few new cakes, which I would otherwise not be able to experiment, without having to finish the cakes all by myself. I hope the folks from the prayer weekend won't regard themselves as my guinea pigs. :)

Actually my original intention was to make the famous no-bake refrigerator cake called Kek Batik but I didn't fancy the thought of stirring the cake batter in a pot continuously for 20 minutes. Then I happened to come across this recipe which also used condensed milk, so I changed my mind and decided to try this recipe instead. I don't know where is the exact source of the original recipe, but I have seen it here and here. The idea of the coffee flavour was inspired by the 2nd link. In order to use up the whole can of condensed milk, I made 2 versions of this condensed milk pound cake, a plain vanilla one and a coffee flavoured one, but I much prefer the coffee flavoured version over the plain vanilla version.

Now it's time to share the fruits of my labour. Sorry, but the 2 condensed milk pound cakes, together with a madeira cake from Nigella and another green tea pound cake,
were snapped up very quickly, and I only managed to take one or two
pictures of all my cakes under sub-optimal lighting before serving them to
some very hungry folks at the prayer weekend. :)

Coffee-flavoured Condensed Milk Pound Cake

Ingredients

120g unsalted butter

1/4 tsp salt

40g sugar (instead of 45g sugar)

1/2 cup or 150g condensed milk *

1 tsp vanilla essence (instead of 1.5 tsp)

105g plain flour + 1 tbsp corn flour * (instead of 120g cake flour)

3/4 tsp baking powder

2 big eggs

1 tbsp instant coffee + 1 tbsp hot water

Notes:

* I used Longevity brand condensed milk 寿星公炼奶 which I bought in Antwerp Chinatown, but is surprisingly manufactured in Holland and not imported from Asia. The Longevity brand of condensed milk is actually manufactured by a Dutch company called FrieslandCampina which markets and produces the famous Dutch Lady brand of dairy products in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Condensed milk is also available in a tube (like a toothpaste) under the brand of Nestle in most supermarkets here in Belgium.

* I used plain flour instead of cake flour for this cake. Just use the same amount 120g of plain flour, spoon out 1 tbsp (1 tbsp = 14.25g) and replace it with 1 tbsp of corn flour. You may also use 120g plain flour, I don't think it will make a difference here as this is not a chiffon cake where it is absolutely necessary to use cake flour.

2. Using a cake-mixer, cream butter and sugar together till light and fluffy.

3. Add in salt and vanilla essence and mix well. Salt can be omitted if you are using salted butter.

4. Pour in condensed milk and mix well.

5. Using the cake-mixer (lowest speed), add in the sifted flour in 3 additions and mix it for a few seconds. (You may also use a hand-whisk or spatula at this juncture but you must make sure that the batter is smooth and well-combined.)